coreander

Coreander

A personal Ebooks server, Coreander indexes the ebooks (only EPUBs with no DRM at the moment) that it finds in the passed folder, and provides a web interface to search and access them.

Features

• Single binary with all dependencies included.
• Fast search engine powered by Bleve, with support for ebooks in multiple languages.
• Search by author, title and even book series (Calibre's series meta supported)
• Estimated reading time calculation.
• High-performance web server powered by Fiber.
• Lightweight, responsive web interface based on Bootstrap.
• Web interface available in English and Spanish, more languages can be easily added.
• New books added or removed to/from the library folder are automatically indexed (Linux only).
• Send to email supported.
• Read indexed epubs from Coreander's interface thanks to epub.js.

Building from source

Coreander's only requirement is Go 1.18.

There are two possibilites for building Coreander from source:

• If you have Mage installed in your system, just type mage install from the source code folder.
• Otherwise, a simple go build or go install will do, although no version information will be added to the executable.

How to use

Coreander is designed to be run as a service managed by systemd or any other service manager. For example, in Raspbian, just create a file called /etc/systemd/system/coreander.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=coreander

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
WorkingDirectory=<absolute path to directory which contains coreander binary>
ExecStart=<absolute path to coreander binary>
PermissionsStartOnly=true
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=sleepservice
User=<user which will execute this service>
Environment="LIBPATH=<absolute path to the library>"

then, start the service with service coreander start. You can manage it with the usual commands start, stop and status. Refer to your service manager documentation for more information.

Coreander requires a LIBPATH environment variable to be set, which tells the application where your books are located.

On first run, Coreander will index the books in your library, creating a database with those entries located at $home/coreander/db. Depending on your system's performance and the size of your library this may take a while. Also, the database can grow fairly big, so make sure you have enough free space on disk.

Every time is run, the application check for new entries, reindexing the whole library. You can avoid this behaviour by setting the environment variable SKIPREINDEX to true.

Even if the application is still indexing entries, you can access its web interface right away. Just open a web browser and go to localhost:3000 (replace localhost for the IP address of the machine where the server is running if you want to access it from another machine). It is possible to change the listening port just executing the application with the PORT environment variable (e. g. PORT=4000 coreander)

Send to email

Coreander can also send documents through email. This way, you can take advantage of services such as Amazon's send to email, which also automatically converts EPUB and other formats to the target device. You can use any email service that allow sending emails using the SMTP protocol, like GMX. The following environment variables need to be defined:

• SMTPSERVER: The URL of the SMTP server to be used, for example mail.gmx.com.
• SMTPPORT: The port number used by the email service, defaults to 587.
• SMTPUSER: The user name.
• SMTPPASSWORD: User's password.